updated 01:40 pm EDT, Mon August 18, 2014

Final release date still nebulous

[Updated with notable changes] Apple is distributing its sixth betas of OS X Yosemite and Xcode 6 to developers. Changes have been largely minor and cosmetic thus far, centering around new appearances rather than fucntionality, and like previous seeds, the updates concentrate on performance and stability fixes. The last betas were released on August 4.

[Update] Thus far, the biggest change in Yosemite DP6 has been updated icons and wallpaper backgrounds. The new beta features new icons for the battery in the menubar, throughout the System Preferences menu, for hard drive types and for various Apple apps such as Terminal, Font Book, Mission Control, Script Editor and Notes.

There are several new shots of the Half Dome at Yosemite National Park used as desktop backgrounds, along with a new photo from the Mavericks image set. The Dashboard is now translucent like Mission Control, and the "Do Not Disturb" switch has reappeared in the Notifications sidebar.

There has been no change to the status of public testers using the Public Beta of Yosemite, which requires a signup with Apple and are still on DP3. Developers are on a different "track" and work with more advanced versions to smooth out and fix major issues before the public beta gets updated. The only update for PB Yosemite users has been recent updates to the Command Line Tools, now at version 6.0.

The finished version of Yosemite should be released sometime this fall, possibly in late October. Xcode 6 should arrive around the same time, although it could pushed out early to support iOS 8, which is expected in September.